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Reframing of Particular Trust
5-27Views:24The paper strives to reconsider the theory of particular trust, i.e. one’s trusting feelings towards her/his most intimate relatives, friends, and personal relations. By doing this, at first, the paper sheds light on two distinct interpretations of particular trust in the literature. One of these approaches addresses particular trust as a kind of core disposition of the self, and it describes how one’s trust towards her/his bonding relations establishes the given subject’s generalized trust towards others, in a broad sense, to people as such. The other interpretation argues that particular trust is important for group-level social dynamics. It claims that if members of close-knit and exclusive groups, dominated by particular trust, are interacting only with each other, and avoiding out-group relations, then broader social cooperation and collaboration are constrained, social integration and cohesion are limited, and on macro level there is an unfolding distrust. As it seems, the above-described readings of particular trust are contradictory. The current paper stresses that just one of these interpretations is coherent and consistent – the first one.
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The Party System of the European Parliament between 2004–2019
112-130Views:30The paper examines the party system of the European Parliament (EP) between 2004–2019
through European Parliamentary Groups. It applies party system typologies in an international
case. The examined period starts from 2004, which marks the largest enlargement of the
dominating the decision-making In addition to the widely used typologies developed by Blondel
and Sartori, the present paper focuses on the relationship between the political groups in the
EP and their role in decision-making. It draws conclusions about the nature of the party system
and its changes over three cycles from the internal cohesion indices and coalition statistics of
the political groups. The party system of the EP is a polarised pluralist system dominated by
two political groups (bidominant). In the period under review, the party system of the EP can be
characterized as balanced, showing only small changes.